How I learned core belief therapy from Rudy Eckhardt, and how the Core Truth podcast came out of it.
Bondi, 2014
We had moved to Sydney from Brisbane for a big engineering project. In Brisbane we had built up a circle over the years: kinesiologists, alternative doctors, healers, people who worked with us on our health. In Sydney we had none of that and we felt it. We were a bit lost.
We had mutual friends who had lived in Sydney a long time and were into the same sorts of things we were. We met one of them for lunch at Bondi and asked him straight out whether he knew any good healers or kinesiologists we could start seeing. He said there was a man he saw, Rudy, who worked out of Bondi. Hard to get in to see. But he would give us an introduction.
Rudy got back to us and said he was booked out for about three months. He mentioned that he had a book coming out, which turned out to be weeks away. And in the meantime he wanted us to read a book by Jane Roberts, The Coming of Seth, because all of his work was based on the Seth material.
That was all he would give us. We asked whether there was anything else we could do to prepare and the answer came back the same. My methodology is based on Seth. Reading Seth will get you prepared.
It was cryptic. It was also intriguing enough that we did it. We read the Seth books and we waited out the three months.
Looking back, I think it was a filter as much as an instruction. Anyone who would not go away and read it was probably not going to last in the room with him.
The first session
It hit hard.
Core belief therapy is not a subtle healing process. It is confronting, particularly when you do not understand your own issues and beliefs. Rudy peeled back the layers very quickly. He had the experience to show you what the issue actually was, and when you find out what it is you are usually very upset, because you have been carrying a lot of misconceptions about yourself, your family and your life. He ripped the band-aid off.
He worked out of an apartment set aside purely for that work. One of the bedrooms had been converted into a treatment room. Before you ever got near the table you sat with him at a desk outside it.
The first session was long, and it cost a bit more, because he had to build your profile. You sat with him for about an hour and talked through your family tree. Your family history. Your issues and your family’s issues, going back a couple of generations, as far back as you could remember. What sort of people they were. What they were like.
He had a ruler, a pencil and a sheet of white paper. He would rule up a grid and start writing notes and drawing family trees inside it. It was extraordinary to watch. Everybody had a file, a manila envelope with the family tree at the front, the mother and father sessions behind it, and then every issue session after that. Some of those envelopes were very thick. People had been seeing him for ten or fifteen years. There seems to be no end to the human list of issues, but the deeper you go, the more you can live without fear.
While you talked he would interject. No, you have misunderstood that. This is what is going on there. He was on the mark very quickly about how core belief systems run through families, because they do. They pass down through what we pick up as children, at an age when we cannot make sense of the world except through the lens of our parents.
Then he checked his work against your body. He used muscle testing, kinesiology as a testing process rather than as a healing modality in its own right. He would say back to you the negative beliefs he thought you were carrying, make you repeat them, and watch the response. Strong meant your body held it as true. It was in your cellular matrix. Weak meant he had not hit the nail on the head.
Most of the time he already knew the answer. He did the muscle testing anyway, for you, because it was the only way to show a person a belief they could not believe they were holding. You would lie there holding dead strong on something terrible about yourself and have to accept that some part of you agreed with it.
The first two sessions were fixed. One for the mother, one for the father. You mapped the mother’s family tree and had that session, then mapped the father’s and had that one. Only after those did you get to issues. He made you book the block of three up front.
What the healing was
You go into the treatment room. There is a table, flat, with a pillow at one end. You lie on your back facing the ceiling.
He stands at the foot of the table and taps your ankles together, which is an energy discharge, the same sort of thing as flicking a thumb on the third eye. From that point you cannot cross anything over your body. Not your arms, not your legs. You lie flat.
Then he starts talking.
His delivery was almost hypnotic. He had trained as a hypnotist, although this was not hypnosis. He would walk and talk, and every four or five words he would pause and you had to repeat them back. Four or five words, then four or five more, on and on and on.
What happens is that your energy drains out of you. Physical energy, mental energy, all of it. You reach a point where you can barely hold three or four words long enough to say them back. You are discombobulated, disconnected, completely washed out. That is the session bringing the issue to the surface, into your energy field. Loading it.
Then he works with his two hands, bridging each chakra along the body, starting below the feet and moving up to above the head. He clears the energy as he goes. Sometimes he would stop and hold a spot for a while, because if you can do this work you can feel the prickly quality of the energy in your fingers. You wait. It dissipates. Then it goes smooth, and you move to the next one, and the next, until the whole chain is clear.
Then he makes you repeat something new. The positive affirmation. The opposite belief to the one you had been carrying, on the love side rather than the fear side. That flattens you as well, because it is a completely new thing in your matrix.
Then he starts above your head and works down to your feet, clearing again, and that seals the process.
You get off the table, you book another appointment, and you go home.
Crossing over
I did not set out to learn it.
What happened was that the sessions started to give me more psychic clarity in ordinary daily life. I had been getting up at four in the morning to do morning pages, which is a good tool for getting the monkey mind onto paper so you have a clear head for the day. But between the Seth material and reading how Jane Roberts had come to channel Seth, I thought I would try automatic writing instead.
So a couple of mornings I got up, put music on in my headphones, kept my eyes off the page, and waited for my hand to move. The first thing that came out was crude and rudimentary, a single subconscious sentence. It grew from there. It took time.
Next time I saw Rudy I told him about it. He challenged me on the spot. He said he had a session coming up the following week with a long-standing client I had never met, and he wanted me to write up some notes for him to work from.
I think he was testing me.
I went back a fortnight later with what I had written. He got the file out and matched it up. It was spot on. What I had written aligned with exactly what that person was dealing with at the time, and I had never met them or seen the file. From that point he treated my gift as real.
He had also, I found out later, been looking for a long time for someone he could train. He was getting old. He had only ever done this himself. He wanted it to be his legacy.
He started sending me his long-term clients, the ones who had no surface issues left and wanted to get at what sat underneath. They would come to me for writing and take it back to him for the session. He was using me to reach things he could not see from the surface.
Then we talked properly about him teaching me. I said yes. I wanted to learn the energy healing in particular, because at that stage I could not manipulate energy at all. I was also at a point in my career, before UDEC existed, where I had had enough. I had been all over the country on project work watching the same mistakes made over and over, and I was ready to do something different.
The apprenticeship
It did not start with the therapy.
I kept booking sessions as a client, but now he explained the process while he worked on me. He showed me how the energy felt, how to move it, how to visualise it, where the chakras sat. The magician started showing me how the trick was done.
Then we set aside a day of the week. I would go to his house, he would see no clients, and we would talk. My job was to document everything he told me and turn it into a process, because I was an engineer and structure was what I was good at. He was good at the work itself. He was not good at explaining it, or structuring it, or producing the kind of documentation a course would need.
We would go for two hours on consciousness, on life, on the Seth material. Not far into it I said we needed to record this. The conversations were good enough to stand as a podcast, and if we recorded them I would not have to write all of it down by hand. So we started recording.
That is what Core Truth is. Thirty episodes of an apprenticeship, recorded because writing it down by hand was slower.
By then his book was out. The Truth of Love and Fear, published in 2014 and republished four years later as The Truth About Love and Fear, under a new title and cover. It sets out the structure of belief systems rather than the therapy itself. There is no how-to in it. You can self-diagnose and self-heal from that structure to some extent, but his method was far more effective. It had been twenty years in the writing, which tells you something about how long he had been circling the same ideas.
Then came homework. He told me to put on a session, with him as the client. I used automatic writing to prepare the notes and worked on him. He would interject and say to add this, and this, and this. But the same thing happened to him as happened to everyone. His energy went out and he ended up flat stick on the table, washed out.
So I was getting there. My process was different to his. He had decades of speaking and belief system knowledge and could improvise in the room. I could not. I did the automatic writing beforehand, brought the notes in, and ran the session from them. He was happy enough with that, and at some point he said that if I wanted to start seeing clients, now was the time.
I set up a small space and started. Over about eighteen months I ran maybe a hundred sessions across thirty or so clients, while doing part-time engineering work to pay the bills.
A lot of them I did not charge. I would tell people straight that I needed the practice. Some were Leah or family, some were colleagues who were interested in that sort of thing. There were paid clients toward the end, once I had got efficient enough for it to be worth it. But the early ones were people already on the journey, which made it easier, because I did not have to start by explaining what kinesiology was or what any of this was about. We lived in a place and a time where a lot of people were searching, and they were happy to be guinea pigs. It is no different to starting out in kinesiology or massage. The first people you work on get you while you are rusty and still working out your own method, and they know it.
Why I stepped back
Two things.
The first was that I loved the work and did not love being a practitioner. The energy healing, the writing, the creative side of it, all of that I still enjoy. What I did not enjoy was the client relationship as it had to be structured. Bringing people into your space. Transacting money. The fact that people become somewhat intimate with you, because they are handing you the most private details of their life, and then they want to stay for a coffee afterwards. Your own space gets invaded. People cancel at the last minute after you have prepared everything, then want to come back the next day.
Rudy was at a point where he could simply say you pay up front and if you pull out you lose the money. I was still learning, and setting hard boundaries like that was difficult for me. It is not really in my personality the way it was in his. It was one of my own insecurities, wanting to please people, and it was something he and I worked on.
The second thing was that Rudy got sick. He had serious health problems, he needed surgery, there were complications, and he was out of action for months. He could not work and he could not work with me. Everything paused. Then my life changed and his life changed, and we never went back to it.
We stayed good friends. I still saw him from time to time. But the thing we had started, structuring the course, never got finished.
He could see that course in his mind’s eye. Thirty students in a room, working on each other, him walking between them showing people how to do different things. A properly structured training program over eighteen months to two years, the way kinesiology is taught in Australia. That is what he wanted to leave behind.
We never got there.
How he learned it
I asked him one day how he had come up with it.
He had grown up in Holland and come out to Australia as a young man. He had spent his whole working life as a practitioner of one kind or another, with training in kinesiology and hypnotherapy and a lot of energy and chakra work. He had learned from many people.
And he was frustrated. He could see the belief systems clearly enough, but he was peeling them back one thin layer at a time, spending enormous time and energy for results that did not match the effort. He was searching for something.
What he told me was that a spirit came to him. He could feel it in his energy field, and it showed him how to do the work. How to move the energy in a particular way. That is how he credited it.
He also said the work did not happen only in the room. In his mind’s eye he was operating in an energetic space, an auditorium, with other entities present who were assisting and observing and learning. I picture it something like surgery with students on the gallery above, watching the surgeon work. And it did not happen only during the session. He held that the work began in the lead-up, continued through the session, and kept going afterwards.
What he was shown was the seed. The process I have described, the fixed parent sessions, the loading and the clearing and the sealing, was the finished version, and I imagine it took him years to develop the intricacies of it.
He never stopped refining it either. I went back to see him a year or two before he died and he had evolved it again. Nothing fundamental, but he had added new elements to the energy healing part. He was always improving it.
And he did it alone. He had plenty of clients but no colleagues, no one to bounce anything off, pushing at the boundaries of a field where there was nobody else. He had been in practice in Sydney since 1991.
Until I came along.
Rudy’s book, The Truth About Love and Fear, is still in print. Booktopia · Amazon. It sets out the structure of the belief systems, not the therapy.